@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:

@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:

@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:

@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:

@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:

I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.

When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.

This is oversimplifying things. While the number is small, and getting smaller - some email providers still do not support SSL/TLS SMTP connections. Of course - the OP could setup their own rule saying, if someone tries to sent them email that isn't on SSL/TLS, don't accept, he'd likely need management approval for that.

It's not. In the same way someone using "encrypted mail" could unencrypt it and distribute things on their end. In both cases, once you hand off, the issue is theirs not yours. That's all encryption ever means. You never control it once they've take responsibility for it.

You're missing the whole encrypted part - not even talking about the sharing shit part.

if you don't have SSL/TLS encryption on transmission, then you don't have HIPAA compliance - so to say all email is encrypted is wrong. - sure 99%+ is because most SMTP now allow for opportunistic TLS, but not all do.

Sure, but it's a pointless argument. Set your email correctly and voila, as you know. You should not have your email set up incorrectly. It's that simple.

@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:

I looked at the total faxes pages for the last 45 days and we have roughly 9000 pages of faxes.

wow

@Dashrender said in Zoho Zillum - family oriented mail and cloud storage:

@scottalanmiller said in Zoho Zillum - family oriented mail and cloud storage:

@Dashrender said in Zoho Zillum - family oriented mail and cloud storage:

@scottalanmiller said in Zoho Zillum - family oriented mail and cloud storage:

@Pete-S said in Zoho Zillum - family oriented mail and cloud storage:

I think these are collaboration tools more than pure business apps like say Zoho CRM or Zoho Project. We are going to use all of them in our family (windows, linux, chromebook & android devices).
Zillum also has it's own unified app/site so it's easier to move between Mail, Workdrive, Cliq etc.

I know, we use all of that. But there isn't much of a family price break. I wonder how well it works if you are already on Zoho for work, I bet it doesn't play nicely. But my kids don't want to use those tools, nor does my wife. It would only be me.

what do they want to use?

Nothing. Most people dont want to use spreadsheets and documents like that.

oh yeah, well sure - but come on - most people at one point in their life or another need a spreadsheet... that's not to say they should buy this for that 'some day' situation.

That's not really relevant. Nor is it true. Most people do not want a spreadsheet at some point. But what is relevant is if they want to pay for it monthly. Welcome to the real world, people don't want spreadsheets, let alone paying for them.

When you DO need one, Google and LibreOffice are free. Of people who use them once in a while at home, is nearly always Google Sheets.

@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:

@JaredBusch said in POTS line replacement:

@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:

Basically they connect to our network and install their "Phone for Business - Advanced device" (I'm guessing just a suped up ATA device) which will allows up to 8 analog that connect to a 66 Block.

You are guessing correctly. It is just a fancy ATA.
Because it is AT&T, I would assume that they are using T1 protocol delivered over IPv4/IPv6 or something similar.

We use to have T1s split out by an MSDT (that is what the old old phone company called them) for 24 lines that worked fine for the alarm system. If it is the same but cut down to 8 then it should work. I just hate the fact they want to charge $500 for this damn device.

Don't hate it. Think of it as a tax or fine for making an intentionally bad business decision long ago - and sticking to it no matter how clearly bad it was. From an IT perspective, this stuff is awesome. It makes it crystal clear how not listening to IT has screwed the company and why making emotional instead of business, decisions is always bad.

If you use Patterson Eaglesoft dental management software you might be wondering what database engine it uses. Commonly people think that it uses MS SQL Server, but it does not.

Eaglesoft uses SAP's Sybase SQL Anywhere embedded database. This is a robust relational database (MS SQL Server was actually derived from it back in the mid-1990s when MS and Sybase were partners.) There is no management studio or tooling for SQL Anywhere on the system and no mechanisms like a VSS writer or other tools.

The database itself stores its data is the PattersonPM.db file and the PattersonPM.log files. Those are the only files used.

@Dashrender said in Decentralized Identity:

I thought - again don't really know about NFTs - that NFT was all about proving ownership of said art?

No, not in any way. That's the scam portion. There's nothing tying an NFT to the art. You only get provenance of the NFT, not the art. NFTs are 100% a cypto scam when used in reference to provenance of physical objects. NFT as a concept is fine, but it has no utility in the art world as anyone can make the original NFT.

You and I could go make millions of NFTs right now for anything that we want. Even things that don't exist. This applies in both the physical and digital space.

@Dashrender said in Decentralized Identity:

Since you make your own identity and publish it to the ledger - why should I believe that?

And why do you trust the ledger? I can go make a ledger AND publish my ID to it. I can also make an ID for you and publish it to it. You can't trust the ID OR the ledger, is the problem.

@Dashrender said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@scottalanmiller said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@Dashrender said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@WrCombs said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@WrCombs said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@Dashrender said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@WrCombs said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@scottalanmiller said in Any outlook guru's here?:

@WrCombs said in Any outlook guru's here?:

google meets meeting , and they can't access it from outlook - my guess is that it's something similar to the above - told them to copy the url below the "link" and paste it in the web browser to see if it would go for the meeting-

This is the issue. They "can't access Google Meets" from the "email client." There seem to be one of two options to this.

1. They are SO dumb that they think that a web URL is going to use Outlook as the web browser instead of the actual web browser.

2. They have received the email instead of Outlook and when they click the link, it does not take them to the meeting.

To "access" something these are the only two logical conclusions from the statement. Either they are trying to access to or access from. Otherwise, how is Outlook even involved?

when he clicks on the meeting invite he gets an error that says "this operation failed" from outlook directly. as for which of the 2 it is, I can't be sure
I found this i was going to try

OK - now we're getting somewhere - do you have a copy of the link you can share that they are clicking on inside Outlook?

I do not, have not been given access to the customer device yet
waiting for him to accept the remote support session , they are in their lunch rush right now

Still have not gotten access so I wont know until maybe tomorrow

but from what I can understand is he just needs to switch to g-mail through google workplace (?) and that will solve 10/11 problems he's having

While that might solve 10/11 problems - the biggest issue you're going to have is getting them to give up Outlook.

I had a customer who had Outlook and On-Premise Exchange - they switched to a third party hosted email solution (not gsuite) through IMAP but refused to give up Outlook. As far as I could tell, there was nothing special about their use of Outlook, they weren't advanced users, used like 5% of the feature. The issue was - it was what they were used to and didn't want to change!

I have a SAMIT video about that exact thing (change, not Outlook) already up and edited and going live any day. I think you'll really like the perspective in it.

How often do you think someone who is currently unwilling to change sees a video like this (any video - not just yours) and actually takes heed to any knowledge in them?

It's not for them, it's for their CEOs and CIOs who are easily tricked by them.

@PhlipElder said in Mikrotik software firewall/router?:

There's always been "suspicion" around inexpensive products since we get what we pay for.
Ubiquiti is no less in the crosshairs of that suspicion with it being justified.

"You get what you pay for" is a standard marketing trick and is anything but true in IT, if anywhere in life. Routers are a key example, the most expensive brands are often crap and the cheapest, like Ubiquiti and Mikrotik, are some of the best. "You get what you pay for" mostly refers to getting hoodwicked by flashy "used car salesmen" who know when someone is unable to evaluate products and so uses price as a proxy because it's easy to not do due diligence.

Dealing with Cisco Meraki stability issues this week. At 1% of the fleet, it has more issues than the bulk of it. But isn't really a bad product, but certainly can't be considered in the same category as higher class (and cheaper) players.

The same sales tactic is used to sell expensive "you have to pay the vendor extortion rates for support" over open source products that are known to be far better for decades. It's probably the best known scam in our industry. And once people overpay and get too little, the vendor has customers over a barrel and they feel that they can't expose to management that they spent a fortune and got less than they would have gotten for cheap or for free. And so the spending spree continues because no one up the chain wants to expose what they've done.

@WrCombs For this kind of thing, i highly recommend building a home lab Postfix / Dovecot server and running your own "pure" email system with no extra layers. Understanding exactly what each piece does in a system with nothing layering on extra features, protocols, ports, management, etc. makes it a lot easier to learn the underlying mechanisms which, in turn, helps to make identifying behaviour much easier.

When you manage a pure SMTP / IMAP system, that there IS no calendar, no calendar protocol, etc. becomes really obvious. When someone demands unrelated components be connected, it's obvious when "there's no tool for that here."

In this case, Outlook lacks a Google Calendar connector or viewer, that's not something Outlook offers. Why does the customer expect it to do so when Outlook was never supposed to do that? Knowing what the customer has set up (an IMAP reader) helps to instantly identify when they are asking for something that makes no sense.

@Pete-S said in Mikrotik software firewall/router?:

@PhlipElder said in Mikrotik software firewall/router?:

@scottalanmiller said in Mikrotik software firewall/router?:

The same sales tactic is used to sell expensive "you have to pay the vendor extortion rates for support" over open source products that are known to be far better for decades. It's probably the best known scam in our industry. And once people overpay and get too little, the vendor has customers over a barrel and they feel that they can't expose to management that they spent a fortune and got less than they would have gotten for cheap or for free. And so the spending spree continues because no one up the chain wants to expose what they've done.

Three cluster setups:
1: Cisco Small Business Pro series Gigabit and 10GbE
2: NETGEAR Gigabit and 10GbE
3: Ubiquiti Gigabit and 10GbE
4: Mellanox/NVIDIA 10GbE, 40GbE, 50GbE, 100GbE

Guess which ones we've had the most grief with? Which one's the least?

I can't stand the suspense. Please tell!

Cisco woudl be reliably the biggest problem. Never seen anything require more support, have more problems.

Netgear is cheap, and we've seen lots of issues. Nothing is as bad as Cisco, obviously, but Netgear relies on easy to manage, easy to replace and if you have the right mindset it'll crush Cisco in the big scheme.

Worked extremely little with Mellanox. Known to be really good stuff.

Ubiquiti is definitely what I'd use most of the time. Good management, better pricing, and has the "easy to replace" advantages that take Cisco out of the serious running. Nothing Cisco could do (but doesn't anyway) could touch the safety net of being able to have spares instead of waiting for clueless engineers to putz around.

@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:

When we combine the traffic volumes of their holdings into Skyetel's network, we become big enough to where the letters IPO have been thrown around. It's insane.

I'm with Jared. Public companies are inefficient and impractical. Going the IPO path (which is not how PE firms work, that's a VC path which is a very different animal) is definitely scary. Blind investing, where the owners don't care about the company anymore, and profits are made by trading the ownership rather than providing products, is a nearly guaranteed downhill slide.

Overview: We have recently discovered an error in Covetrus’ "requirements" for AviMark that creates a fragility and is based on a misunderstanding of network name discover in Windows and Windows-based networks by the vendor. Systems can be impacted by this somewhat at random, or never, but it is an unnecessarily risky configuration and less performant than an ideal one. The vendor requirement of using hostnames in URIs for the shortcuts can be workable but only in an environment that runs a full, management DNS server that is correctly configured. Covetrus often does not recommend this configuration, however, and the majority of their deployments do not have this safety measure and even those that do have unnecessary levels of complexity and dependencies that can be avoided.

Details: Covetrus has mistakenly relied on a guessed outcome of a race condition in DHCP name assignments within automated DNS configurations that are a common configuration in small businesses. Their assumption is that the identity of the Avimark server operating system will be detected consistently by a DHCP server which will then automatically populate a DNS entry that will be used to point services to the server. This works the majority of the time, but it is not deterministic and can fail at random. If such a system does not exist (either because there is no DHCP or because auto-populating DNS is not configured) then DNS lookups of the hostname will fail and Windows will fall back to a WINS name resolution system which will pull the nbtname of the system via unconfigured WINS and attempt to rectify the name resolution in that way. This works the majority of the time, as well. But DNS hostnames and nbtnames are not actually tied together and will not necessarily work. Each piece of this assumes something will “just work” without actually being configured to do so.

Three common flaws exist in this process. The first being simply when no DNS or WINS is available at all, the system simply does not function. The second is when DNS and WINS are not configured the same and WINS is required (This one is preventable by the system administrators.) The third and most common is when DHCP and auto-populating DNS do work, but the race condition gives them a different entry in the DNS table as primary than the one expected by the Avimark configuration thus pointing the Avimark shortcuts to the wrong location. Because the Covetrus documented process is non-deterministic, this presents a sizeable risk and the race condition is actually expected to fail in cases where certain enterprise class devices are used and configured. The Avimark documentation assumption is that the race condition is uncommon in consumer devices, which is likely the only type they have tested on.

The fix is simple, instead of using Covetrus’ documentation which is demonstrably incorrect under standard conditions, CCW is manually configuring to follow standard best practices instead and using IP address entries which are static and deterministic removing the entire need for name lookups altogether. This removes many layers of fragility, removes the need for complex DNS management to overcome a gap in Avimark design, improves performance, and improves security.

Importantly, moving to static IPs in the shortcuts allows for IT departments of any skill level to reliably provide server discovery for Avimark. And it removes the need for clinics to implement and maintain additional servers and complexity only for the purpose of avoiding the use of a best practice.

As with most software vendors, it is common that a company that makes (or just sells) software to have little or no IT knowledge and to make recommendations or even requirements that are illogical or even completely dysfunctional. There is no reason for Covetrus to have recommendations around this as it is outside of their scope (and clearly, outside of their ken.) This is an IT function and has nothing to do with their software, overriding common IT knowledge and industry best practices should only be done when there is a solid understanding of the problem domain - something we would not expect from a software vendor, and something consistently not demonstrated by Covetrus (they also regularly recommend pirating Windows and violating the EULA to their customers, something they only have some legal ability to do by disavowing any IT responsibility or knowledge.)

@Pete-S said in Facebook at Work (Meta Workplace)?:

Has anyone ever seen a company in the wild that uses Facebook at Work (Meta Workplace)?

It's their social media site for internal company use, built on the Facebook code.

workplace.com

I've seen it before, but not in use in a real company. Feels like a crazy platform to use for internal needs. No security and all that. What company is THAT lax on security?

@gjacobse said in Facebook at Work (Meta Workplace)?:

@Pete-S said in Facebook at Work (Meta Workplace)?:

@gjacobse said in Facebook at Work (Meta Workplace)?:

WHY,.. Why would you do that. That is ten times more poison them Sharepoint.

I don't know. Don't companies use Sharepoint?

I guess I'm wondering in general if companies use internal social sites. Or perhaps they just use messaging apps like Teams and Slack or just...nothing.

Sharepoint - is what we are using ...

Not quite the same. Yammer is Microsoft's product in this category, not Sharepoint. Sharepoint is not a social site, it's a wiki.

@WrCombs said in Any outlook guru's here?:

So this is still an issue - Outlook and Google workspaces aren't syncing the calendar, everything else sync'd.

all research I've done is pointing to 3rd party apps that have no guarantee to actually work

Correct. But don't let the customer define this as a "problem." The two are not related and should not sync. That he's wanting them to sync is the problem. That's like saying that his Google Calendar doesn't sync to MangoLassi. What? Why would it, the two are not related.

So nothing wrong with wanting something that doesn't exist, but he needs to understand that he's asking for something that isn't a thing and acting like it is broken when the issue is that he bought the wrong software for the task that he wants done.

In theory, some third party software MIGHT be able to get the two to talk to each other, but it'll never be official, or supported and could certainly break. He designed this not to work, that's by his own design. If he wants you to try to make it work anyway, don't pretend that you are fixing something that isn't working, you are attempting to overcome a "by design" limitation that he, the customer, put in place personally.

Did some digging on the MS forums and they said that because they are Volume Licenses through the CSP program you seem to always get 500 regardless of what is purchased. Some people are convinced that this is a bug, some think it is just a lazy approach. But there seems to be consensus that this always happens. So the program that you buy through is the determining factor, at this time.

@stacksofplates said in Eero Inquiry:

@Dashrender said in Eero Inquiry:

@dbeato said in Eero Inquiry:

@WrCombs You cannot hide your SSIDs on Eero. You also have a limit of your Main SSID and Guest Network. It is geared for Home and really small environments.

https://support.eero.com/hc/en-us/articles/214588166-Why-can-t-I-hide-my-network-SSID-with-eero-

Why Eero over Ubiquiti? Business versus consumer. Does the pro version have APs with wired connections?

Prob because management is much easier. I ditched my APs and edgerouter for a single Amplifi which I can update and control from my phone. My mom has a Deco setup and it works very similarly and is great as well.

Easier if you do it yourself. But if you have a support company, I think the Unifi is easier. The Eeros always made for a lot of extra work when we had to deal with them.